An international team of scientists from South Africa, Canada, France and the UK has uncovered fossil evidence of a tiny ecosystem that helped kick-start the recovery of Earth's oceans after a global ...

For most organisms on Earth, rocks are objects, not food. But for one oddball microbe, desert limestone seems to have been on the menu. Whether or not this mysterious form of life still exists or went ...

In the arid zones of southern Africa, traces of ancient environments are often sealed deep within mineral-rich rock formations. These regions are among the most geologically stable on Earth, and their ...

Mysterious micro-burrows in desert marble and limestone were probably made by microbes that lived millions of years ago. Exactly what kind of microbes bored into the rock remains unknown, as does ...